Alannah Tomkins
Biographic Data
| ID | 3955885 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alannah Tomkins |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alannah |
| FAMILY NAME | Tomkins |
| SIGNATURE | TOMKINS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Keele University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7224-9337 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Bricks, Brickmaking, and the Economies of the Old Poor Law: Staffordshire 1750–1834
This article considers the place of brickmaking as an activity supported or promoted by parish poor relief. Parochial work schemes were typically founded on agricultural work, textile manufacturing, or unskilled tasks like oakum picking, yet the manual exertion was necessarily required for making bricks prior to mechanization attracted some parishes to experiment with this form of hard and deterrent labour. Brick production did not take place in …
The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
This 2019 monograph about the pervasive fear of debt and the consequences of legal insolvency has now been issued as a paperback. The title is taken from Daniel Defoe's categorization of the financial difficulty that befell middling people as a result of “Misfortune or Mismanagement,” in contrast to the “Poverty of Inheritance” that burdened the laboring poor. Consequently, this is a book about the insecurity inherent to the enjoyment of prosperi…
Sexual abuse by superintending staff in the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum: Medical practice, complaint and risk
The nineteenth century witnessed a great shift in how insanity was regarded and treated. Well documented is the emergence of psychiatry as a medical specialization and the role of lunatic asylums in the West. Unclear are the relationships between the heads of institutions and the individuals treated within them. This article uses two cases at either end of the nineteenth century to demonstrate sexual misdemeanours in sites of mental health care, …
Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914
Histories of the English workhouse and its satellite institutions have concentrated on legal change, institutional administration, and moments of shock or scandal, generally without considering the place of these institutions, established through the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in the emotional life course of poor inmates. This article uses working-class autobiographies to examine the register of emotional responses to workhouses and associat…
Sickness in the Workhouse: Poor Law Medical Care in Provincial England, 1834–1914 by Alistair Ritch
Reviewed by: Sickness in the Workhouse: Poor Law Medical Care in Provincial England, 1834–1914 by Alistair Ritch Alannah Tomkins Alistair Ritch. Sickness in the Workhouse: Poor Law Medical Care in Provincial England, 1834–1914. Rochester Studies in Medical History. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2019. 309 pp. $128.00 (978-1-58046-975-3). The divide between professional history and professional medicine is not totally impermeable,…
Professional Migration, Occupational Challenge, and Mental Health: Medical Practitioners in New Zealand, 1850–1890s
Australasian colonies were promoted as ‘lands of opportunity’ for British medical practitioners of the Victorian period, but once there doctors often found that any problems they faced had travelled with them. Furthermore, the act of migration could add to personal difficulty. This article builds on existing work about the challenges confronting doctors in England, and on the potential of asylum records to address the consequences of migration, t…
Poverty and Welfare in Guernsey 1560–2015
Sickness, Medical Welfare and the English Poor, 1750–1834
The Old Poor Law ended in 1834, and historians are largely agreed on why: existing practice was regarded as too generous, and contemporaries were intent on ascribing this to unjustified relief for
The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-century London
"The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-century London." The European Legacy, 21(1), pp. 123–124
Samantha Williams, Poverty, gender and life-cycle under the English poor law . (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2011.) Pages xiii+166+Bibliography+Index. £50 hardback. SamanthaWilliams, Povert…
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England, by Ian Mortimer
This is an important book for the social history of medicine, but not necessarily for the reasons given by the author and subsequent reviewers. It has been flagged as providing evidence for a ‘profound revolution’ whereby dying people increasingly looked to doctors in their final illness, and placed much greater demands on practitioners as a consequence. I can suggest some problems with this analysis, but can also offer some alternative reasons f…
Mad doctors? The significance of medical practitioners admitted as patients to the first English county asylums up to 1890
‘Mad doctors’ specialized in treating the insane, but what about the doctors whose own mental health was jeopardized? Oppenheim found that doctors who attended the mad were presumed to be particularly vulnerable, but there has been no research investigating this claim, nor identifying practitioners’ experiences as patients. This article analyses medical admissions to asylums via both case notes and other sources such as newspaper reports, reveali…
Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580-1800, by Patricia Crawford
Parental experience encompasses many of the bland constants of human life; the pains of childbirth, the fragility of infancy, the replacement of outgrown clothes, the anxieties about transition to adolescence and independence. Yet context is everything, to the extent that the most physically and emotionally involving of these events or processes may seem very different depending on gender, wealth, status and a host of more subtle environmental fa…
Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, by Jane Humphries
Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First‐person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900
This guide accompanies the following article: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First‐person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900, History Compass 9/5 (2011): 365–373, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2011.00774.x Author’s Introduction Histories of the experience of poverty are hampered in the period before widespread literacy, owing to the infrequency with which the words of the poor could be inscribed privately and the mediated qualities…
I mak Bould to Wrigt’ 1: First‐Person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900
Historians of the poor and experiences of poverty have long attempted to write ‘history from below’, in other words from the perspective of the poor themselves. This is problematic when the poor in question were either illiterate, or left few or no first‐person sources of the types associated with the elites and middling sorts, such as diaries, letters or commonplace books. In the last 25 years, though, written genres have emerged that can fulfil…
Who were his Peers? The Social and Professional Milieu of the Provincial Surgeon-Apothecary in the Late-Eighteenth Century
The social standing of the surgeon-apothecary cannot be determined by reference to professional life alone, yet few such men left social documents. The lower middling sort was typically reticent about evaluations of their own social position in any source genre. This article uses a unique archive, and the concept of community connectedness, to investigate the status of Thomas Higgins, surgeon-apothecary and man-midwife of north Shropshire. Higgin…
Demography and the midwives: Deliveries and their dénouements in north Shropshire, 1781–1803
This article uses the evidence of midwifery deliveries to investigate the strengths and shortcomings of parish registers, and to pose questions about infant and maternal mortality. It focuses on the delivery notebooks of Thomas Higgins, a man-midwife of north Shropshire, but also employs comparators from Staffordshire and Yorkshire. The research incorporates a technique for dealing with infants where neither a baptism nor a burial can be found. T…
Prisoners' Letters to the Bank of England 1781-1827
Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons . By Lisa Forman Cody
The Excellent Example of the Working Class: Medical Welfare, Contributory Funding and the North Staffordshire Infirmary from 1815
Contributory funding schemes for hospitals typically emerged in the late nineteenth century, but the North Staffordshire Infirmary was probably the first hospital to obtain workers' contributions (dubbed ‘establishment’ funds) on a mass scale. The early years of the hospital's finances were characterised by crisis and instability but the establishment income became central to both its survival and its identity. Nonetheless, this gave rise to an a…
Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950
Parishes provide the evidential basis for much research on English history, so a new volume that offers to explore the changing nature of the unit in its many different ecclesiastical and civil guises is a great draw. When the volume is by Keith Snell it automatically commands attention, and weighing in at over 500 pages of text this is undeniably a substantial read. Yet the result is a valuable but uneven book. Its value lies in its central thes…
Almshouse Versus Workhouse: Residential Welfare in 18th-Century Oxford
This article investigates the character of residential welfare in I8th-century England. Experiences of life within either almshouses or workhouses has been relatively neglected in the historiography of welfare, and comparative studies are absent from published work. Even so there is a broadly favourable, homogenous interpretation of almshouse life and a more pessimistic but varied impression of workhouses. This article discusses the material cond…
I mak Bould to Wrigt’ 1: First‐Person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900
Historians of the poor and experiences of poverty have long attempted to write ‘history from below’, in other words from the perspective of the poor themselves. This is problematic when the poor in question were either illiterate, or left few or no first‐person sources of the types associated with the elites and middling sorts, such as diaries, letters or commonplace books. In the last 25 years, though, written genres have emerged that can fulfil…
Almshouse Versus Workhouse: Residential Welfare in 18th-Century Oxford
This article investigates the character of residential welfare in I8th-century England. Experiences of life within either almshouses or workhouses has been relatively neglected in the historiography of welfare, and comparative studies are absent from published work. Even so there is a broadly favourable, homogenous interpretation of almshouse life and a more pessimistic but varied impression of workhouses. This article discusses the material cond…
Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914
Histories of the English workhouse and its satellite institutions have concentrated on legal change, institutional administration, and moments of shock or scandal, generally without considering the place of these institutions, established through the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in the emotional life course of poor inmates. This article uses working-class autobiographies to examine the register of emotional responses to workhouses and associat…
Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950
Parishes provide the evidential basis for much research on English history, so a new volume that offers to explore the changing nature of the unit in its many different ecclesiastical and civil guises is a great draw. When the volume is by Keith Snell it automatically commands attention, and weighing in at over 500 pages of text this is undeniably a substantial read. Yet the result is a valuable but uneven book. Its value lies in its central thes…
Almshouse Versus Workhouse: Residential Welfare in 18th-Century Oxford
This article investigates the character of residential welfare in I8th-century England. Experiences of life within either almshouses or workhouses has been relatively neglected in the historiography of welfare, and comparative studies are absent from published work. Even so there is a broadly favourable, homogenous interpretation of almshouse life and a more pessimistic but varied impression of workhouses. This article discusses the material cond…
The Excellent Example of the Working Class: Medical Welfare, Contributory Funding and the North Staffordshire Infirmary from 1815
Contributory funding schemes for hospitals typically emerged in the late nineteenth century, but the North Staffordshire Infirmary was probably the first hospital to obtain workers' contributions (dubbed ‘establishment’ funds) on a mass scale. The early years of the hospital's finances were characterised by crisis and instability but the establishment income became central to both its survival and its identity. Nonetheless, this gave rise to an a…
Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950
Parishes provide the evidential basis for much research on English history, so a new volume that offers to explore the changing nature of the unit in its many different ecclesiastical and civil guises is a great draw. When the volume is by Keith Snell it automatically commands attention, and weighing in at over 500 pages of text this is undeniably a substantial read. Yet the result is a valuable but uneven book. Its value lies in its central thes…
Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons . By Lisa Forman Cody
Demography and the midwives: Deliveries and their dénouements in north Shropshire, 1781–1803
This article uses the evidence of midwifery deliveries to investigate the strengths and shortcomings of parish registers, and to pose questions about infant and maternal mortality. It focuses on the delivery notebooks of Thomas Higgins, a man-midwife of north Shropshire, but also employs comparators from Staffordshire and Yorkshire. The research incorporates a technique for dealing with infants where neither a baptism nor a burial can be found. T…
Prisoners' Letters to the Bank of England 1781-1827
Parents of Poor Children in England, 1580-1800, by Patricia Crawford
Parental experience encompasses many of the bland constants of human life; the pains of childbirth, the fragility of infancy, the replacement of outgrown clothes, the anxieties about transition to adolescence and independence. Yet context is everything, to the extent that the most physically and emotionally involving of these events or processes may seem very different depending on gender, wealth, status and a host of more subtle environmental fa…
Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution, by Jane Humphries
Teaching & Learning Guide for: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First‐person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900
This guide accompanies the following article: ‘I mak Bould to Wrigt’: First‐person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900, History Compass 9/5 (2011): 365–373, DOI: 10.1111/j.1478‐0542.2011.00774.x Author’s Introduction Histories of the experience of poverty are hampered in the period before widespread literacy, owing to the infrequency with which the words of the poor could be inscribed privately and the mediated qualities…
I mak Bould to Wrigt’ 1: First‐Person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900
Historians of the poor and experiences of poverty have long attempted to write ‘history from below’, in other words from the perspective of the poor themselves. This is problematic when the poor in question were either illiterate, or left few or no first‐person sources of the types associated with the elites and middling sorts, such as diaries, letters or commonplace books. In the last 25 years, though, written genres have emerged that can fulfil…
Who were his Peers? The Social and Professional Milieu of the Provincial Surgeon-Apothecary in the Late-Eighteenth Century
The social standing of the surgeon-apothecary cannot be determined by reference to professional life alone, yet few such men left social documents. The lower middling sort was typically reticent about evaluations of their own social position in any source genre. This article uses a unique archive, and the concept of community connectedness, to investigate the status of Thomas Higgins, surgeon-apothecary and man-midwife of north Shropshire. Higgin…
Mad doctors? The significance of medical practitioners admitted as patients to the first English county asylums up to 1890
‘Mad doctors’ specialized in treating the insane, but what about the doctors whose own mental health was jeopardized? Oppenheim found that doctors who attended the mad were presumed to be particularly vulnerable, but there has been no research investigating this claim, nor identifying practitioners’ experiences as patients. This article analyses medical admissions to asylums via both case notes and other sources such as newspaper reports, reveali…
Samantha Williams, Poverty, gender and life-cycle under the English poor law . (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2011.) Pages xiii+166+Bibliography+Index. £50 hardback. SamanthaWilliams, Povert…
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The Dying and the Doctors: The Medical Revolution in Seventeenth-Century England, by Ian Mortimer
This is an important book for the social history of medicine, but not necessarily for the reasons given by the author and subsequent reviewers. It has been flagged as providing evidence for a ‘profound revolution’ whereby dying people increasingly looked to doctors in their final illness, and placed much greater demands on practitioners as a consequence. I can suggest some problems with this analysis, but can also offer some alternative reasons f…
The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-century London
"The Childhood of the Poor: Welfare in Eighteenth-century London." The European Legacy, 21(1), pp. 123–124
Poverty and Welfare in Guernsey 1560–2015
Sickness, Medical Welfare and the English Poor, 1750–1834
The Old Poor Law ended in 1834, and historians are largely agreed on why: existing practice was regarded as too generous, and contemporaries were intent on ascribing this to unjustified relief for
Sickness in the Workhouse: Poor Law Medical Care in Provincial England, 1834–1914 by Alistair Ritch
Reviewed by: Sickness in the Workhouse: Poor Law Medical Care in Provincial England, 1834–1914 by Alistair Ritch Alannah Tomkins Alistair Ritch. Sickness in the Workhouse: Poor Law Medical Care in Provincial England, 1834–1914. Rochester Studies in Medical History. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2019. 309 pp. $128.00 (978-1-58046-975-3). The divide between professional history and professional medicine is not totally impermeable,…
Professional Migration, Occupational Challenge, and Mental Health: Medical Practitioners in New Zealand, 1850–1890s
Australasian colonies were promoted as ‘lands of opportunity’ for British medical practitioners of the Victorian period, but once there doctors often found that any problems they faced had travelled with them. Furthermore, the act of migration could add to personal difficulty. This article builds on existing work about the challenges confronting doctors in England, and on the potential of asylum records to address the consequences of migration, t…
Sexual abuse by superintending staff in the nineteenth-century lunatic asylum: Medical practice, complaint and risk
The nineteenth century witnessed a great shift in how insanity was regarded and treated. Well documented is the emergence of psychiatry as a medical specialization and the role of lunatic asylums in the West. Unclear are the relationships between the heads of institutions and the individuals treated within them. This article uses two cases at either end of the nineteenth century to demonstrate sexual misdemeanours in sites of mental health care, …
Poor Law Institutions through Working-Class Eyes: Autobiography, Emotion, and Family Context, 1834–1914
Histories of the English workhouse and its satellite institutions have concentrated on legal change, institutional administration, and moments of shock or scandal, generally without considering the place of these institutions, established through the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in the emotional life course of poor inmates. This article uses working-class autobiographies to examine the register of emotional responses to workhouses and associat…
The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
This 2019 monograph about the pervasive fear of debt and the consequences of legal insolvency has now been issued as a paperback. The title is taken from Daniel Defoe's categorization of the financial difficulty that befell middling people as a result of “Misfortune or Mismanagement,” in contrast to the “Poverty of Inheritance” that burdened the laboring poor. Consequently, this is a book about the insecurity inherent to the enjoyment of prosperi…
Bricks, Brickmaking, and the Economies of the Old Poor Law: Staffordshire 1750–1834
This article considers the place of brickmaking as an activity supported or promoted by parish poor relief. Parochial work schemes were typically founded on agricultural work, textile manufacturing, or unskilled tasks like oakum picking, yet the manual exertion was necessarily required for making bricks prior to mechanization attracted some parishes to experiment with this form of hard and deterrent labour. Brick production did not take place in …
Political science (19 works) · History (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (14 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (11 works) · History (10 works) · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Poverty (9 works)